


The Kids Aren't Alright

by cryingbreakfastshinji (rocketdeer)



Series: MK. G.E.T. [1]
Category: Neon Genesis Evangelion
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/M, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Lowkey Asuka/Shinji and Rei/Shinji, M/M, Multi, Polyamory, Slow Build
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-07-13
Updated: 2015-08-03
Packaged: 2018-04-09 05:34:46
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 4
Words: 11,665
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4335827
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rocketdeer/pseuds/cryingbreakfastshinji
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You'd think if they'd have all been a little older, they might have figured it out and been happy. </p>
<p>AU where Kaworu Nagisa's surveillance mission turns out exactly how you'd expect.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. PIANO GAY IS COMING TO TOWN

Know your enemy.

At least that’s what they had told Tabris, why they had sent him so prematurely, with Ramiel’s hollow carcass still only half-dismantled in the center of Tokyo 3.

“My name is Kaworu Nagisa.”

After all, Tabris was to be the 17th angel.

“It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

And the fifth child.

“I moved here from Germany, where I’ve lived for most of my life.”

His presence was hardly necessary as of yet.

But looking around at the ignorant children, the shape of their thoughts simple and unobtrusive where the light of his soul reached out to each of theirs, he felt neither malice nor resentment toward them. The more and more Tabris saw of the Lilin, the less they resembled the boogeymen that he had been taught. Even the first and third children, killers in their own right, were no more insidious than the next. They looked to him and away, their minds somewhere else, hardly interested in the Lilin-shaped adversary that stood before them with his Lilin name up on the chalk board.

“Please take care of me.”

None of them seemed like enemies.

He concluded that Lilin were all rather small and sad and lost, their cruelness exaggerated, not much else to know and study. Tabris would do as SEELE asked of him as he had little choice, but it seemed to him that defeating the Lilin would not be so much making war as putting a distraught child to bed.

\--

There were particular customs and morays to follow when Lilin befriended each other, that much was readily apparent from his knowledge of media and the limited interactions he’d seen between SEELE employees throughout the course of his life; and Tabris knew just enough to understand that it was a subtle and complex affair, and that he might as well discard it for all the mistakes he was bound to make. Anyway, when dealing with someone like Rei Ayanami, who seemed to know even less than he on the subject, that kind of thing hardly mattered. So Tabris used his personality like a battering ram and all but harassed Ayanami until she had nothing better to do than return his conversation—curtly, with mild annoyance. She was an individual who liked being left alone with her thoughts, even if at times she also felt isolated from the people around her.

He was so curious. Ayanami was just like him. How did she not want to know him too?

Tabris walked Ayanami home from school, at least to the train station. Tabris stared at her unblinkingly during lunch and posed questions that Lilin asked each other when getting to know one another. Tabris went as far to tell her, one day when they were both cleaning the classroom afterschool, the reason for his particular interest, “You and I are the same.” Each time she ignored him and ignored him—until that day afterschool, when apathetic, “emotionless” Ayanami glanced up over a bucket of soapy water and narrowed her eyes in something very like a glare.

Tabris was from Germany, which had one of the largest NERV bases in the world. Tabris was unlike the other children in face and manner, more similar to her than they. Ayanami realized, to a degree, what he meant. And then she looked back down at her wash rag and rung it efficiently and ruthlessly.

Delighted, Tabris left the topic alone for a while, let Ayanami consider the implications. She knew precious little about her own existence beyond her general inhumanity and replicability—and virtually nothing about her Angelic origins. In that way the two of them had been raised the exact opposite. But Tabris saw the uniqueness of her soul and knew, she was just like him. She only need be taught.

\--

“No,” was the third thing Ayanami ever said to Tabris—after “I will if I am ordered to,” when he had first asked to be friends, and “This is extraneous,” the first time he had imposed himself on her walk home.

She said it in response to Tabris broaching the topic of their sameness again, as they sat at the edge of the track field and watched the children running. By all accounts, Ayanami had not been paying any attention to Tabris’ small talk from the moment he finished his laps and folded himself onto the ground beside her. Rather, the whole time she had been staring at the Third Child and the two boys he was often found with, as they chatted and joked and ran their mile at a relaxed pace.

Tabris felt something like shock when she broke her focus to actually reply, and even more so when Ayanami continued, “We might be very similar, but I do not think we are the same.”

Tabris was practically gleeful. It was the most she had ever said to him, ever.

“Why do you suppose that?” He asked nonchalantly, and then wondered what he meant to gain by concealing his excitement.

“Are we not each our own person?”

“Well I am separate from you and you are separate from me, but that’s—,”

“Is Kaworu Nagisa not different from Rei Ayanami?” She interrupted, evidently finding his train of thought unsatisfactory. She was still staring at the Third Child. “You would not say one and mean the other.”

“In a way—,” Tabris began, because as Angels they were as much one and the same as they were different entities. But Ayanami was not finished.

“We might be very similar,” Her voice was paper thin but she cut across his speech without effort. “But I am me, and you are you. You could not replace me, and neither I you. And in that we are not the same.”

Tabris thought about that for a while. Then he said, “But that is only one way of measuring our likeness,” Angels, of course, were all very different to an extent. “But we are more similar than we are different.”

“But our similarities are not as important as our differences. If they were, then the differences wouldn’t have much effect, and you and I would be functionally the same, which we are not,” She turned her head infinitesimally from Shinji Ikari’s retreating back and met Tabris’ red eyes with her own. “It is the existence of the differences in the first place that demonstrates their importance.”  
She left him to ponder that in stunned silence. It took several minutes of puzzling before Tabris realized he couldn’t construct a suitable retort.

“Even supposing you are correct,” Tabris began eventually, and continued speaking as the bell rang for the end of period, “I would not say that our differences are so great that we could not, perhaps, become friends?”

Ayanami did not answer, did not seem to mind him as she got to her feet. But she did wait for Tabris to stand, and walked in step with him towards the school, favoring him with thoughtful glances as he started and ended new tangents of thought. And if the Lilin children around them murmured and stared, then neither of them noticed much anyway—certainly not Tabris. It was the closest to a “yes” he’d ever gotten from her.


	2. JOKE’S ON YOU, TCHAIKOVSKY WAS GAY

Kaworu Nagisa was a guy who was good at sports and talking to girls, and who never listened in class but would blatantly stare out the window, with his chin propped up on his hand and his elbow propped up on the corner of the laptop he should have been using. He wore the winter uniform even in the sweltering, stagnant air of the classroom, a green sweater with the sleeves pulled down all the way over the backs of his hands. He stood too close while he was talking to someone. And one time during PE, while all the girls were watching, he kicked a soccer ball so hard into Shinji’s face that his vision literally went black.

When Shinji came to a few seconds later, he was flat on his back, in the mud, staring into a vaguely apologetic smile and an offered hand like a beckoning ghost.

“Are you alright?”

“Uhh—,” As Shinji was pulled upright his head began to throb, but he stammered out, “ye-yeah—,”

“That was a good block!”

Their hands released and fell away from each other and the temperature difference was stark, probably because of the rain.

“Thanks?”

Another smile, a jaunty wave, and his first and only conversation with Kaworu Nagisa ended.

 --

During lunch, if Kaworu Nagisa was not being accosted by someone about joining a sports club, or a girl who wanted to borrow pencil led, he passed the time by turning around in his seat, long arms folded over the back of his chair, and holding (apparently) one-sided conversations with Rei Ayanami. It was hard to tell because she was always looking out the window and you couldn’t see her mouth from where Shinji, Toji, and Kensuke sat together in the middle of the room, eating their lunch and stoking their suspicions.

Toji was the one to bring it up first, peering conspicuously over the edge of a milk carton. “Say, you don’t think the transfer student likes Ayanami, do ya?”

“Well she is pretty,” Kensuke said without looking up from his camera.

“Yeah true but that’s _all_ she is, ya don’t think he’s _tired_ of her yet, Ice Queen ignoring him the whole day?”

Shinji was overwhelmingly relieved that someone else was saying what he’d been thinking to himself all week, but he felt that if he tried to contribute to the conversation he’d betray that his interest was a little more than halfhearted, so when he opened his mouth what came out was, “Keep your voice down.”

Ayanami turned slightly to Nagisa but Shinji still couldn’t see her face, and he couldn’t stop thinking about after the fifth angel, and how she smiled. Toji stomped on Shinji’s foot under the desk. “I’m quiet enough dammit.”

If Shinji strained, he swore that when Nagisa’s lips moved and curved upward, for once he could hear what the words were: “Will you walk home with me today?”

\--

It was a day where Toji was at the hospital with his sister and Kensuke had caught a cold, so after Shinji finished his bento, there wasn’t a whole lot else keeping him in the classroom during free period. Even Ayanami was absent, robbing him of the lunchtime ritual of nervous glances and subsequent self-loathing for not going over to talk to her. The guy who usually did that had already left with a trio of girls to buy lunch at the cafeteria, and not yet returned.

Shinji wound up in the music room, because sometimes he couldn’t stand to sit there in the classroom knowing who everyone was and everyone knowing who he was and not being able to go up and hang out with them like Toji or Kensuke could have. The school didn’t have a lot of instruments, definitely not a cello, which was certainly the only instrument he was really comfortable with—but it did have an upright piano, far from new. It had been much the same way at his old middle school, and ever since then Shinji had been teaching himself to play piano in his free time at school. Reading the music had come relatively easy to him, so after figuring that out he’d been working on clumsily moving his fingers quick enough to recreate a couple of songs.

With twenty minutes of lunch left to kill, Shinji found a music book of Tchaikovsky and flipped through until he saw something familiar. It had still been a long time since Shinji had played the piece, so his performance went haltingly at best, but it was cathartic to focus all his energy on something that didn’t leave room for outside thoughts. He had not quite finished the final note when a voice behind him said, “That was lovely.”

Shinji jerked around on the bench, he hadn’t even heard the door slide open. Of all people Kaworu Nagisa stood in the middle of the room, staring unnervingly into his eyes with a wide smile, holding his packaged lunch at his side like an afterthought. But Shinji hated praise, especially of such a mediocre performance, so he looked away sharply and stammered, “Not really, I’m not very good . . . ,”

Nagisa walked forward until he was leaning over Shinji’s shoulder, and Shinji kept his head down, shrinking away. The other boy reached past him and traced the staff at the top of the page with a finger. “Well, be that as it may you put a lot of yourself into your playing, it’s very moving to watch.”

The complement wrapped up in an insult wasn’t much better than Nagisa’s initial praise, but when Shinji glanced up, Nagisa was looking down at him from the corner of his eye and smiling innocently, and the annoyance dried up like his mouth.

When all Shinji did was stare mutely, Nagisa began, “I think music is the greatest achievement of the Lilin culture,” Existentialism was an odd thing to bring up arbitrarily, let alone with someone you didn’t even know. “Don’t you agree, Shinji Ikari?”

His first instinct had been to ask about the unfamiliar word, but the use of his name caught him off-guard, since they’d never been introduced. “You know my name?”

Nagisa turned the full strength of his smile on him, shaking his head a little like he was teasing. “ _Everyone_ knows your name,” Shinji began to relax as the other boy straightened—only to settle next to him on the bench, their hips touching suddenly, and Shinji jumped back a couple inches to give him room. “I don’t mean to sound rude but, you’re a rather ignorant of your own position . . . ,”

Then Nagisa settled his long fingers over the keys and played part of a scale.

“Oh, you play?” Shinji said before he could stop himself.

Nagisa looked at him slyly through his eyelashes with another half-smile. “Well _yes_ ,” Shinji tried to feel offended again, but was stopped short when Nagisa continued, “Would you mind if I joined you?”

“Join me? I—,” What was he doing. “I wouldn’t mind.”

And that was how Shinji ended up watching Nagisa thumb through the pages of the music book until he came to a piece designated _quatre mains_ at the top—“It means two players on the same piano,” Kaworu explained.

Shinji warned him, “I’m not good at sight reading, so I’ll probably mess it up a lot—,”

But Nagisa just settled the book back on the piano’s music shelf and said cheerfully, “We’ll just go slowly then.”

By far, Nagisa was the better musician. He had perfect timing, stopping and restarting in time with Shinji’s mistakes, and could flip to the next page so quickly there was hardly any interruption. Occasionally when Shinji had particular trouble with a set of notes—red-faced with his eyebrows pushed together in confusion and embarrassment—Nagisa would pause and demonstrate slowly how to move his hand, and then have Shinji try it a few times before they restarted. Nagisa raised his eyebrows at Shinji’s embarrassment at first, but then his voice became gentle, so that Shinji didn’t mind so much being corrected—being helped, rather. Having Nagisa show him how to play made Shinji calm down a little, at least a little bit until he made a new mistake.

At Nagisa’s request, they went through the piece two more times, steadily improving with each run through—until the bell rang signaling the end of lunch. They played to the end of that stanza and stopped.

“Thank you, that was pleasant. I think I like playing with you.”

What a weird way to say something like that. But Shinji thought that Nagisa seemed sincere, even though he’d had to help Shinji a lot, and Shinji couldn’t bear to meet the eyes boring into the side of his face. “Y-you don’t have to thank me or anything! It must’ve been pretty annoying, having to stop so much—,”

“Oh, not at all,” There was a smile in Nagisa’s voice. “You are a very fast learner. As I said, it was my pleasure, Shinji Ikari.”

It sounded too sincere. Shinji swallowed and played with his hands in his lap. “ . . . You don’t have to use my whole name every time, you know, Nagisa-kun,” He gathered his courage and looked up.

Nagisa thought for a moment, tilting his head. “Ikari-kun?”

“Yeah, that’s fine.”

Nagisa smiled in reply, his too-red eyes boring into Shinji’s again, and didn’t say anything else.

Shinji cleared his throat. Nagisa didn’t even blink. “So, we should get back to class . . . ,”

“Oh, of course.”

It was only after they had hastily put the room back together, and were walking down the hallway that Shinji realized Nagisa had never gotten to eat his lunch. As Shinji apologized for it, Nagisa looked down at the unwrapped sandwich curiously, like he had forgotten what he’d bought it for, and then laughed under his breath.

“ _I_ asked to play with _you_ , Ikari-kun. It’s not as though you should apologize,” And then he stepped closer and bumped his shoulder into Shinji’s friendlily.

Shinji was extremely conscientious both about being touched and about his habit of apologizing, and his face flushed red as he flinched back from Nagisa. It only made the other boy tilt his head again, and even though he was smiling, something about the intensity made Shinji feel uncomfortable this time.

“You are extremely afraid of any kind of initial contact,” Nagisa said, as if he were talking about the weather, “Even when it is offered in goodwill. Are you _that_ afraid of other people—?”

“Why would you say that?” Shinji cut him off, his voice a little sharper than he’d meant. He was embarrassed and a little angry even—he couldn’t believe someone would talk to him like that.

Despite looking surprised that he’d been interrupted, Nagisa continued, “Well, I know that keeping others at a distance allows you to avoid a betrayal of your trust, but don’t you think doing so is at least as lonely as being betrayed?”

“That’s not—that’s not what I meant!” Nagisa leaned away from him now, eyebrows raised, as if he finally realized that Shinji was upset. “Why did you want to tell me that?”

Nagisa thought about that for a moment, and when they arrived at their classroom he paused outside the door. Shinji stopped with him, waiting. “I suppose it’s the same reason anyone says anything. Was my conversation untoward?”

“Yes.” He couldn’t look at Nagisa anymore. Shinji stepped around him awkwardly and escaped into the classroom, sat down at his desk, and didn’t talk to anyone the rest of the school day.

 --

Despite his best efforts to ignore Nagisa and if at all possible never speak to him again, they accidentally made eye contact in in P.E. a few days later during basketball, and Shinji found himself helplessly returning one of Nagisa’s broad smiles. Toji elbowed him in the side and said, “What’re you even _doing_?” as Shinji stood there waving a little to one of the players on the other team.

Shinji had been hoping that no one would remember that moment of insanity, but when lunch came around, Kensuke waited precisely until Nagisa left for the cafeteria before asking when they’d become friends.

“We hung out in the music room one day,” Shinji said without looking up from his lunch. “He plays piano.”

That’s when Toji reentered the classroom, his arms full of sandwiches. “’Course he does! Little prick has to be good at everything.” He sat down and spread the food out on his desk top.

Nagisa had blocked half of the layups Toji made during their game, the two of them being some of the tallest in their class. He had also said, “You’re so very loud,” the first time Toji scored a basket and was shouting and crowing. Shinji had to pull Toji away by the front of his t-shirt, while Nagisa looked on blankly, with his head tilted to the side.

“I mean what the hell kind of guy says something like that though—,” The class rep turned around and shouted something about keeping it down over there. “’Course I was loud, I just _scored_ on his sorry ass, _you_ shoulda’ let me pop him one so he knows not to fuckin’ talk to me like that again . . . ,”

“No reason to get in trouble,” Shinji muttered.

“He’s always kind of like that though,” Kensuke said, “I guess that’s why he’s always hanging out with girls, they’re the only ones who’ll put up with it . . . Though, he told Mori on the stairs yesterday he could see her panties.”

“Well that’s just—polite,” Shinji said.

“Not coming from a _guy_ ,” Kensuke replied, and then he began to smirk. “You wouldn’t say that to _Ayanami_.”

Ayanami was indifferent, not deaf, and she glanced over from her seat against the window and Shinji panicked.

“Wuh-well—I don’t think he _means_ it that way though—,” He stammered, desperately pushing the conversation away from Ayanami’s underwear, “he just kinda, Nagisa-kun says whatever comes to mind, so it comes out _sounding_ rude, but really he’s just—different, I guess—,”

Maybe he was going to ramble on more, but at that point Horaki shouted, “ _Ikari-kun_!”

Shinji turned, already flushing as he considered maybe he’d been too loud, and came face-to-face with Kaworu Nagisa’s blank expression and his head tilted to the side.

There was a long moment where Shinji, frozen in horror, was stuck staring into Nagisa’s very red eyes. But before Shinji could wrench himself from the paralysis and maybe apologize, Nagisa smiled one of his wide, stupid-looking smiles.

“Ah, well, thank you, Ikari-kun. I was worried you were still upset about the other day,” Finally Nagisa glanced away, almost coyly. “I had been thinking maybe you’d forgive me if I bought you a soda—but even so, maybe I could still, hmm?”

Shinji didn’t understand what was happening. He could see Horaki and her friends past Nagisa and they also looked like they didn’t understand—so maybe he wasn’t going insane.

“I mean, are you free after school today?”


	3. STIRRING THE POT

Kaworu Nagisa insinuated himself into Shinji’s life effortlessly, like he was unaware of that awkward transitional period when becoming friends where neither party was quite sure how to act. He just began eating his lunch at Shinji’s desk when Ayanami was absent, very curious about trifling things and talking a little too loud. Every other day he’d ask Shinji to walk home with him.

It got to be that sometimes when Nagisa left to buy his food, Toji and Kensuke would drag Shinji up to the roof to eat. The seemingly random philosophical monologues and long, unblinking staring that passed as conversation with Nagisa annoyed and unnerved them.

“You are fuckin’ _smitten_ ,” Toji remarked one day, in the way that he commonly derided Shinji about cooking or cleaning—half-heartedly critical, but mostly confused. Kensuke made a noise of assent.

“What’s what supposed to mean?” Shinji grumbled around a mouthful of rice. He’d just been telling a story where Nagisa misused some slang, it was _funny_.

“You let him walk _all_ over you, an’ at first I thought it was just cause you’re a guy who lets people walk all over him, but nah, you really _like_ hangin’out with him, don’t ya?”

Until then, it hadn’t occurred to him that Toji and Kensuke dragging him to the roof, or telling Nagisa that Shinji was busy afterschool, was as much for Shinji’s sake as theirs.

Shinji frowned and rolled his eyes, and mechanically claimed otherwise, but he’d found that throughout the past few days, as long as Nagisa stayed away from praising or analyzing him, Shinji thought the things he talked about were interesting. And maybe he liked being smiled at so much, too.

\--

The Jet Air debacle came and went, Shinji spent all day tiredly regaling Kensuke whenever they found a scrap of time to talk. He was actually relieved when he had to stay behind to clean the classroom and Toji and Kensuke went home without him. But when Shinji and Horaki had finished, and they were walking out of the school together in a friendly silence, there were two people loitering by the school gate.

Shinji could feel Horaki’s eyes burning into the side of his head, as Nagisa raised his hand and called to him emphatically. Beside him, Ayanami stood perfectly still and watched their approach unblinkingly.

“Hey Nagisa,” Shinji said, less empathically. Horaki quietly said goodbye and kept walking after Shinji stopped next to them, hurrying like she thought she was intruding.

“H-hey Ayanami.” She nodded, stoic as usual.

“We thought we’d wait for you today, and walk home together,” Nagisa explained, his eyes round and expectant.

“Yeah, okay.”

It was fortunate that Nagisa was there, because if it had been up to Shinji and Ayanami the walk home would’ve been practically silent. But Nagisa could hold an entire conversation with himself, and his monologue today was about melon-flavored snacks, and how they have nothing melon-flavored in Germany, and how interesting it is that melon-flavor became so popular in Japan, melons must have some sort of significance in Japanese culture.

“Oh, uh, well—,” Shinji admittedly had never given the subject as much thought as Nagisa. “I guess we give them as gifts sometimes—if you’re going to visit someone, or thank them for doing something for you . . . ,”

“Oh!” Nagisa paused thoughtfully. “Should I have bought you a melon instead of a soda?”

“No, no you wouldn’t do it for something like that, that’s ridiculous . . . R-right, Ayanami?”

Ayanami made a shrugging motion. “I couldn’t say.”

Before Shinji could decide how to answer that, Nagisa jumped like he’d just realized something. “Actually I wanted to ask you, Ikari-kun—Ayanami doesn’t have experience with a lot of things, and I’m much the same, but we both want to—experience things!” Shinji felt skeptical about the truth of this because Nagisa was pretty pushy and Ayanami looked positively apathetic, but then she inclined her head a little in what could be interpreted as a nod. “And you seem to be a very experienced person.”

“That’s not really true, Nagisa-kun . . . ,”

“Well you knew about melons!” Nagisa said, waving his arm to the all of Shinji. “ _We_ didn’t know about melons! It’s just things like that—like, clothing shopping, and going to restaurants, and Valentine’s Day.”

“That’s, pretty specific.”

“Those are the things in particular I was interested in,” Nagisa said by way of explanation. “I have been doing a lot of reading as of late.” He looked over at Shinji, who only realized he had begun to smile when Nagisa returned it.

The millisecond of silence was suddenly unbearable and Shinji had to break it with something. “Wha-what do you read?”

“Quite a lot of things. Should I make a list—?”

“What _kinds_ of things have you been reading—you know, about shopping . . . ?” Elaborating on what he meant was something Shinji had been getting better at since hanging out with Nagisa. He was always misinterpreting simple sentences, probably because he was a foreigner. Slang was still another entity entirely.

“Oh! Manga. I’ve bought a couple of the magazines.” The titles he listed off were all girl’s manga and Shinji laughed a little, but felt bad when Nagisa looked confused and quickly told him nothing was wrong.

“So what are you doing on Sunday, Ikari-kun? Can you come do something with us?”

If Shinji’s face heated up, it wasn’t quite at the idea of hanging out with Ayanami on a weekend, or the weird way Nagisa phrased it. Being wanted was something he was still getting used to, and it wrenched another smile from him and made him nod yes.

 --

Sunday consisted of taking the train to the nearest shopping center and loitering there until the sun began to set. The three of them walked through all seven levels of the building, window shopping, and ate nothing but borderline mall food. They weren’t doing much of anything, and it was one of the most authentic high school experiences Shinji’d had up to that point. But initially Nagisa kept trying to buy them clothes.

“That’s what you do, when you go out with people, correct?” He said confusedly, as he held up a crop-top to Shinji’s shoulders.

“Going—? Nagisa we’re just hanging out!”

Ayanami slurped her slushy and watched.

“Well yes, that’s what I meant, but—I read—,” He held up the shirt again.

Shinji smacked it away. “ _I’m_ telling you friends don’t buy each other stuff! That’s only if you’re on a date.”

Ayanami and Nagisa both looked at each other. She was wearing a beanie he had chosen for her at the previous store. “Oh, sorry,” Nagisa said.

“It’s alright,” Ayanami replied, her voice a hair above a whisper, “do you want it back?”

“Not really. You can keep it anyway.”

She made a noise of assent and took another drink.

Now that they had that settled, Shinji went to take the shirt from Nagisa to put it back on the rack, but Nagisa jerked away from him. “What? Maybe _I_ want it.”

“ _Really_?” Shinji said, unable to keep the skepticism out of his voice. The nicest way to put how he felt about the neon-orange crop top was that it didn’t look like something Nagisa would wear. Neither he nor Ayanami had bothered with anything other than their school uniforms, and Nagisa was still wearing his winter sweater in spite of the stiflingly humidity outside.

“Sure. I’ve never bought clothes before. Even my uniform was issued to me by my guardians.” That made Shinji pause. He decided it was probably an issue of language.

“You mean your parents?”

“Oh no, I don’t have parents. My government-assigned caretakers,” Nagisa turned to Ayanami. “Ayanami has Gendo Ikari, your father, correct? It’s like that. They always buy clothes for me when it has become necessary, and I never really—well—,” He glanced at Shinji who, in anticipation of a not-a-date with Ayanami, had worn his nicest polo shirt and the purple Nikes that made up one third of all the pairs of shoes he owned. “I couldn’t say I cared before I began public education, but they look so pretty.”

Something warm was welling up inside Shinji, maybe it had something to do with the way Nagisa was looking at that ugly shirt. He was caught between a desire to help him, and the urgency to stifle whatever the warmth was.

“That one won’t look good on you, you should pick something else.”

“What? But the color—,”

“Nagisa-kun, it’s awful.”

Nagisa turned to Ayanami and whined, “Ayanami—!”

She just looked at the shirt, looked back to him and raised her eyebrows a fraction of an inch. It was so funny coming from her that Shinji laughed embarrassingly loud, and it was enough to convince Nagisa to abandon the crop-top.

But it figured that no matter what Nagisa picked out, it was at best eccentric. The color combinations seemed to clash, and he made weird matches like a button-down shirt with sweatpants. Shinji eventually had to admit that he just didn’t have a frame of reference, since every time Nagisa came out of the changing room, the strange amalgamation of clothing had somehow formed itself into something that looked pretty good.

Three different times Shinji nearly said aloud that he thought it was only because Nagisa was the one who was wearing them, but he always caught himself in time. It wasn’t like he meant it in a weird way or anything—really, Shinji just thought that Nagisa was one of those lucky guys who looked good in anything, even mismatched clothing. He just didn’t want anyone to take it the wrong way (hedidn’twantthewordstocomeoutofhismouthmoresincerethantheyweresupposedtobe).

While Nagisa took clothes into the changing rooms, Ayanami and Shinji sat a polite distance apart on a bench outside and waited. As per usual, Ayanami didn’t look at him, staring straight ahead. Nothing changed when she finished her slushie except that she held the empty cup between her knees. Shinji couldn’t help but be hyperaware of her presence, fighting the usual war of wanting her attention and subsequent self-loathing for wanting it so badly. The pleasant interactions they’d shared were too overshadowed with instances of awkward silence and curt replies, and thus far he had concluded that A) he liked her and that B) she absolutely hated him.

But when Shinji finally stopped with the wallowing and turned to face her, Ayanami glanced over and made eye contact without any air of contempt or annoyance. She still didn’t smile, she just stared, but she reminded him of Nagisa in that way—not so much that she was being rude, but that she was different.

He told himself to breathe. She didn’t hate him. He made himself speak.

“Ayanami, did you want to buy clothes, too?”

“Hmm?”

When she didn’t elaborate, Shinji continued, “Nagisa-kun said he’d never bought casual clothes, and that’s why he just wore his uniform—and I’ve seen that you only ever, uh, wear your uniform too, so I thought . . . ,”

Ayanami glanced away thoughtfully, and when she turned back to Shinji she said, “I hadn’t thought about it. Probably not.”

“Why?”

“ . . . I suppose just because I never thought about it,” She paused again and looked down at her lap, her fingers worrying the hem of her dress. “Is it not right to wear this when we’re not at school?”

Shinji felt like someone had dropped a stone in his stomach, his face flash-fried red. “N-no, you can wear what you want! I wasn’t sa-saying, I just meant—,” He choked on the sentiment he didn’t know to express and stopped. Ayanami had turned back to him, and when Shinji looked at her face, her eyes had actually widened a little, as if she hadn’t expected that strong of a reaction.

“If you _want_ ,” He began again, “I could uh, Nagisa-kun and I can pick out—uh well—,” Shinji stopped again because that felt like it was going in a bad direction, he couldn’t find a safe way to say anything. But Ayanami apparently didn’t misread his intentions—she’d pieced together what Shinji was trying to say from his half-finished sentences and nodded, looking none the more offended. Then she turned back to the dressing room entrance and didn’t say anything else.

At first, the dropped conversation and continued silence spurred Shinji back into panic. But when he snuck glances at Ayanami, she seemed the same as before—so the silence wasn’t because he’d overstepped his boundaries. When Shinji’s brain allowed him to calm down, sitting with Ayanami felt kind of like walking to the school gate with Horaki, in that maybe it was okay when neither of them had anything to say.

Throughout the whole rest of the trip, Ayanami showed little interest in anything that Nagisa procured for her or the things that Shinji pointed out. But toward the end of the day, when Nagisa was wholly satisfied with the clothing he had picked and was preparing to check out, she found a dress she liked. Nagisa tried to get her to try it on, but she shook her head and said, “I don’t need to, I already know I like it.”

\--

The only thing stranger than Asuka Langley Sohryu—the two-faced second child and royal pain in Shinji Ikari’s ass—turning up as a transfer student at their high school was how she reacted when, strolling confidently through the classroom door, her gaze landed on Kaworu Nagisa.

The rest of the classroom, which had begun to chitter at the appearance of yet another transfer student, froze in silence while she pointed at Nagisa and screeched in fast-paced German—but she didn’t seem as angry as she happened to sound, she was smirking a little. Then Nagisa grinned and replied in the same.

This was the point where the teacher, having already arrived, stood up from his desk and called for class to start pointedly. No one had the chance to accost Asuka as she strolled to the front of the classroom and put her name on the chalkboard in loopy, elegant cursive. Out of obligation everyone quieted down, but it was a tentative peace that broke the moment the lunch bell rang.

 --

“I can’t believe you never said anything, Nagisa-kun . . . , “ Shinji said, kicking a pebble that bounced along the road ahead of him.

“It just never came up in conversation,” Nagisa said breezily, stretching his arms behind his back. But it was still rather hard to believe that in the last few weeks they’d spent together, Nagisa had never found a time to mention to a NERV pilot that his guardians worked for NERV, and that he used to live at the NERV base in Germany.

Apparently, Nagisa had actually spent most of his life there, since his guardians had lived on base and watched him while they worked—and then when he got old enough, he went to the tutor provided for the children there, too. Though Asuka began to take college classes as soon as ten, that’s where they had first met.

“It’s funny that you _happened_ to get transferred right to where _I_ was meant to go—,” Asuka said, her voice somewhere between sing-song and scathing, a few steps in front of both of them. When Nagisa had asked Shinji to walk home with him earlier that day, Asuka had spun around and declared that she would join them. So there they were.

Nagisa shook his head, still smiling. “NERV Japan is where most of the activity is nowadays, so it makes sense that more people are being transferred here. I see you haven’t gotten any less presumptuous.”

Shinji stifled his laughter because Asuka hit hard. Asuka challenged Nagisa’s remark by declaring a race to see who could reach that car first and started without giving Nagisa more warning—and then they were both sprinting ahead of Shinji.

Beneath the thin veneer of their apparent friendship lay a boiling rivalry that Asuka single-handedly fueled with dares and challenges and insults, and which Nagisa reciprocated with quiet but enthusiastic participation. Shinji watched Asuka reach the car first, by virtue of her starting early according to Nagisa, and felt tired and a little warm just watching them.   

\--

With her at-best standoffish personality, Shinji never expected Asuka to get along with Ayanami; and when Nagisa mentioned that the three of them were friends, Shinji’s first reaction was to cringe as Asuka demanded that they introduce her.

Then she added, “Well, aren’t you just a collector of Eva pilots, Kaworu?”

Nagisa just smiled in return.

But when Asuka finally cornered Ayanami one morning while she read before class started, her loud and somewhat piercing voice was the only similarity to the way she treated Shinji.

“ _I_ think we ought to be friends—,” She drawled, standing in front of Ayanami’s desk and examining her nails languidly, “being that we’re the only girl Eva pilots.”

And while Ayanami’s only response was to look up and stare at her in a way Shinji thought was skeptical, Ayanami said, “It makes no difference to me,” and that was that. Asuka had climbed into the strange, informal trio that had been building up between Ayanami, Nagisa, and Shinji since they had gone to the mall that one weekend. Shinji couldn’t understand why she even _wanted_ to hang out with them though, half the time her response to something Ayanami did or said was an exasperated proclamation that she was weird, and one hundred percent of her interactions with Shinji were bossy and scathing. Looking at her strange relationship with Nagisa though, Shinji thought maybe she was just incapable of being nice to anyone, even one of her friends.

Now Toji and Kensuke were avoiding two people at lunchtime, on the days where Ayanami was present and Asuka made it her business to round up Nagisa and Shinji so that they could all eat together. When Ayanami was absent Asuka tended not to bother though, and instead began to hang out with Horaki, surprisingly enough.

Keeping the balance between Toji and Kensuke, and Nagisa, Ayanami, and Asuka was tedious. Of the three of them Asuka seemed to like Shinji the least, but she was still demanding about having his presence when the rest of them had decided to walk home together, or playing on the same team in PE. Worse yet, where Nagisa had once been accommodating of Shinji declining sometimes, now he had begun to back her up when Asuka forcibly monopolized Shinji’s attention. Shinji glared at him a few times, trying to telepathically convey that he knew what was going on and he was not happy about it—but Nagisa would smile over Asuka’s shoulder apologetically, and then Shinji’d forget until the next time.

 --

Things with Asuka got worse after the seventh angel, for two reasons.

The first was that they started living together and then didn’t stop. Shinji’d been hoping that Asuka would move back to NERV headquarters after they were done “synchronizing,” but she never even mentioned the thought (let alone moving the innumerable cardboard boxes out of his room), and it didn’t look like Misato was going to make her, either.

He’d hate to admit it, but after the first few days, making an extra lunch wasn’t that much of a pain, and he’d memorized where all the boxes were in the dark when he had to pee. After the first week, Shinji even started helping Asuka find space in her room for all of her junk—only because his room was so messy, and because he liked cleaning and organizing.

. . . But that wasn’t entirely true.

Because the second reason was that throughout their training together, Shinji had begun to like Asuka.

(Not like that! Definitely not! Shinji admitted he wasn’t the most aware when it came to people, but he recognized enough of how he felt about Ayanami to know that it wasn’t remotely comparable!)

But after Misato was promoted, when Kensuke and Toji and Horaki and Kaji came over to celebrate, Shinji told her she didn’t have to put up the act, the sickly-sweet voice and wide-eyed naivety that spat in the face of, well, the things that he actually liked about her. The unwavering confidence and the no-nonsense.

Well, the fact that Asuka just hissed that it was none of his business and pinched him was also part of what made her, her. Shinji just wished that sometimes she could take a break from using it to abuse him.

(So he had lied a little. One night during their training, Asuka had sleepwalked into his room and. Shinji got a little carried away for a moment—she seemed gentle in her sleep. But nothing happened! He took his blanket and went to the other side of the room. It was just for a moment that he got carried away.)

But the two of these things together essentially made it so that when Asuka told Shinji they were walking home together with Nagisa (and occasionally Ayanami), Shinji couldn’t refuse. Toji and Kensuke began going ahead without him, casting apologetic looks in his direction as they told him they’d see him tomorrow.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fluff? Fluff.


	4. SO THIS IS NORMAL RIGHT

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh I am so sorry about this. Had about 90 pages typed up on the computer but it, in its long four years of life, finally decided to crash, so I lost all that. Finally got around to posting this chapter, but you might as well consider this fic dead, I'm kinda too sad to keep at it now, and if I do pick it back up, it won't be until after I finish another project or two I've been wanting to write. Thanks everybody!

To use the term popularized by teenage girl Lilin, Ayanami was Tabris’ “girlfriend.” This was not so say that they dated, but rather that she was a girl who was his friend, with the added connotation of one who was often confided in, and their shared life experiences made her an excellent confidant. Ayanami knew very, very many things about Tabris—and to his knowledge Tabris knew the important things about her.

Early on they had discussed their trouble adjusting to life as Lilin. Although Tabris hadn’t told her yet who or what she was, he had shared his own experiences with SEELE and test tubes and that enormous machine they had both spent so much time in, recording their memories so that if or when they died, much of their knowledge could also be replaced.

“There’s a lot of things they’ve never told me,” Ayanami had said nearly at a whisper, as they had lay on Kaworu’s bed and stared at the ceiling. It was relaxing to be around just each other, absolved of the burden of trivial things like remembering to blink. “Or maybe they expected I would learn, but I didn’t. I can’t, I don’t think.”

“If we can learn things like reading and arithmetic, I can’t see why we couldn’t learn Lilin behaviors as well,” Tabris replied.

“But no one else has to be taught, they just know,” She said, and she sounded sad.

“Well,” Tabris shifted onto his side, looking at her profile, immobile except for the slightest, probably subconscious furrow of her eyebrows. “I do think it’s instinctual for most Lilin. But one thing I _have_ learned is that every one of them is different—some have mental irregularities and do not function as other Lilin do, for example,” He paused to order his thoughts. “So in that respect, I don’t think that we are dissimilar from them. We only need to be taught the things that most Lilin are born knowing. But this doesn’t make us any less Lilin than they are.”

Then he wondered why it was that he was counting himself among their number.

It was intriguing and heartening to watch Ayanami grow beyond her shell. It was nearly invisible if Tabris hadn’t been paying attention. Ayanami had often lamented her difficulty with making facial expressions by which Lilin normally communicated their feelings, and complemented Tabris on his apt use of them. But together they had begun to catalogue and describe their feelings to the other, the common ones for which they had been given names as well as the ones that were new and unknown to them. From there it was a simple task of remembering which ones corresponded to which expressions.

Ayanami still did not use regular human expressions. But she widened her eyes when she was surprised, and narrowed them when she was upset, and her mouth twitched when she felt like laughing. And these things Kaworu pointed out to her and encouraged when they were alone and could discuss how to make themselves more like Lilin.

And now that she did show some expression, Shinji had begun to pick up on them and would respond in kind. He wanted to please her so badly. But Ayanami could not yet utilize the light of her soul, and could not see this for herself as Tabris could.

“I don’t know that Ikari-kun likes me,” She told him one day. They both stood in her tiny kitchen around a boiling pot of soup, as Ayanami practiced the recipe for the party she had arranged the following week. Tabris watched curiously with his hands clasped behind his back as Ayanami stirred and spoke, “Sometimes he will smile, and it seems as if he does like me, but mostly he is very upset whenever he tries talking to me . . . ,”

Tabris thought back to the stuttering and the flinching. “To be fair, he _is_ like that with everyone.”

“Not Suzuhara and Aida,” She said.

“Hmm. I don’t think he worries about impressing them so much, though . . . ,” Tabris paused in contemplation again. “ _They_ are predictable in their actions. But we confuse him you and I, and he becomes nervous . . . I don’t think he knows how to talk to us any more than we do to him.”

The subject of Shinji Ikari had become very “we” lately. They had compared their feelings concerning the boy and found them to be similar, warm and oddly different than the way they felt about each other, or Asuka.

“I know he likes being with us,” Kaworu tried again, when Ayanami did not speak. “He was grateful for the party, correct?”

That was one thing she _had_ picked up on, the day she’d given Shinji his invitation. Ikari’s voice shook as he had thanked her, smiling broadly. She nodded slowly, staring absentmindedly into the broth.

“Ikari-kun just has to learn how to deal with us as we have to deal with Lilin. But I know he wants to,” Tabris nudged her shoulder with his own. “He likes you very much.” He liked her best, in fact. Ikari’s soul was more often than not warmed by glancing at her and speaking to her and hearing her reply. It would be incorrect to say Tabris hadn’t looked upon their interactions greedily and longed for something like that to be extended to him—but more than that he was happy for her.

\--

Time passed so pleasantly and effortlessly for Shinji that he hardly even realized when half the semester and midterms were over. Though fighting the angels left him mentally and emotionally exhausted, nowadays the reassurance of having friends and being _liked_ for once helped him sleep a little more and torment himself about his joke of a father a little less, like some of the demons sitting on his chest had been exorcized. It wasn’t as peaceful as before, when he lived with his teacher, but it was different and it was better.

Nearly a month after the trip he didn’t get to go on to Okinawa and the angel in the volcano, Ayanami handed Shinji an envelope, her fingers covered in bandaids. Shinji read the invitation and felt a little excited, because even if he was skeptical about what Ayanami could actually make, a dinner party sounded like fun. It’d certainly be nice to not be the one cooking for once.

When Ayanami told him his father had agreed to come, his throat closed up, and underneath all of the dejection he was floored. Shinji couldn’t even be angry at himself for shredding the resentment towards his father; he was too full up of gratitude towards Ayanami.

It was raining that afternoon—in fact Shinji had known it was supposed to but, in a burst of carefree optimism decided not to mention it to Asuka (who of course had not looked at the weather report) because his father was going to pick him and his friends up afterschool, and they were going to have lunch, Misato would meet them there . . .

It was a day where Shinji had been nervous with anticipation all through class, thankful that school was a half day on Saturdays.

The rain began halfway through lunch, and became a full-scale downpour by the time the four of them walked outside to wait on the benches beneath the covered entrance of the school. Incidentally, neither Ayanami nor Nagisa had brought umbrellas either—Ayanami didn’t even own a TV, and Nagisa confessed to having never watched the news. Toji was the only other person who’d forgot, but he just ran through the rain with his book bag held over his head, yelling, while Kensuke laughed and walked leisurely behind him with the other umbrella-bearing students.

Asuka made sure to growl at Shinji for “not thinking to check the weather—but I suppose you’re lucky since we’re getting a ride today.”

The rest of the students, baring those who stayed behind to clean, had dispersed by the time a long black car rolled through the gates. But then the car jerked to a stop, a good thirty feet from where they were sitting, and nothing happened.

After a minute, Asuka sighed deeply in that way that meant she was becoming exasperated. “He doesn’t expect us to _walk_ allthe way out there in this _rain_ does he?”

Ayanami stood up as if she meant to go talk to him, but so she didn’t have to get wet Shinji said, “I can go ask—maybe he’s got some umbrellas—,” and leaving his school bag next to Nagisa he hurried out into the rain.

But it was several long moments outside the car door before it opened and Gendo stepped out, a black umbrella unfurling as he straightened. His cell phone was cradled between his shoulder and chin, and he was talking with carefully controlled annoyance about something to do with the Magi. Shinji thought that maybe he meant to share, but his father held the umbrella close—to keep water out of the inside of the car, Shinji realized. Either way, he was not about to step into Gendo’s personal space uninvited.

So Shinji stood there, his head awkwardly bowed against the rain, waiting to be spoken to. Soon the rain stopped being an irritant and became a driving force that slicked his shirt to his back and shoulders. He couldn’t be sure how long he actually spent there, time moved with agonizing slowness as Gendo talked and didn’t even glance at Shinji.

"Fine, I’ll be there shortly.”

Gendo flicked the cell phone shut and finally, finally looked at him—for a moment, before turning and climbing back into the car, after folding the umbrella and shaking it.

“Something has come up that I need to attend to,” Shinji must have asked what it was because Gendo replied, “As of now it’s classified.”

He spared one last glance at Shinji to say, “Where’s your umbrella? You’ll catch cold,” and then the door slammed shut and the car screeched in reverse.

Shinji could hear Asuka shouting, “ _What_?” as the car pulled away, and distantly he hoped she wasn’t going to yell at him for this. He walked back to the school without urgency, since there wasn’t any possible way for him to get wetter than he already was.

Shinji didn’t look up at any of them, not even when Nagisa called his name. He sat back down next to his bag—but then he had to scoot away from it a little, as he was dripping on it.

“ _Really_?” Asuka began. “He _just now_ cancelled on us? And he didn’t even give you an umbrella—he must’ve had an extra or two for the car!” She paused, and then said in a low, accusatory voice, “Did you even _ask him_?”

Shinji flinched and Asuka gave a little shout of frustration. “ _Stupid_! That is _so_ like you—you just let him walk all over you! How’s anyone supposed to respect you like that? God—!”

“Asuka,” Nagisa said. She harrumphed and fell silent.

A pale hand rested its finger tips against Shinji’s knee. Nagisa had a way sometimes where he stopped acting so strange and childish and became surprisingly gentle, and his voice was low and calm as he said, “It’ll be alright Ikari-kun . . . Surely he’ll reschedule for us.”

As subtly as he could, Shinji wiped his nose on the back of his hand and managed to glance up. Nagisa’s answering smile was apologetic. “I suppose we’ll just have to wait for the rain to slow down? Then we can all walk to the train station, okay?”

Nobody answered. Sitting next to him, Ayanami looked particularly withdrawn, staring at the ground silently, and Asuka stood a little behind her, arms crossed as she did not look at them, angrily. Then the line of her mouth hardened.

“Shinji, you’ll probably catch a cold like that, huh?” Shinji did feel cold, which was a definite change from the norm, but he didn’t think it was quite that bad. Asuka continued before he could speak, “Kaworu, you should lend him your sweater, so he doesn’t get sick.”

The kind look on Nagisa’s face stiffened and his head snapped to look at Asuka, who resolutely stared in the opposite direction. “Nobody _else_ brought a coat, after all.” Something was wrong because she was using her sing-song voice.

“No it’s okay, I’m not that cold—,”

“But there’s no sense in risking it. You’re soaked,” Finally she looked at Nagisa, raising her eyebrows mockingly. “Right, Kaworu?”

When Nagisa spoke his voice was small, “You _know_ I can’t—,”

“Can’t what? You know that sounds pretty selfish to me.”

“Asuka, _quit_ . . . ,” Shinji said desperately. “Nagisa-kun don’t worry about it, I _really_ don’t need it . . . !”

But Nagisa just looked down at his lap, a frown settling over his features.

“Jeez, am I hungry,” Asuka stretched her arms above her head. Apparently antagonizing Nagisa had put her back at right with the world again. “ _I’m_ going to the vending machine—c’mon First!” She tapped Ayanami on the shoulder. “Come with me, let’s have some girl-time!”

Ayanami shook her head a little—she really didn’t look like she wanted to do anything. Shinji realized she’d probably been looking forward to spending time with his father as much as he had, and between her and Nagisa’s melancholy he was starting to feel a little panicked. Words of comfort he didn’t know how to say were piling up in his throat and he glanced between the two of them, desperately, as Asuka ended up hooking her arm through Ayanami’s and hauling her upright, patting her hand as she did so.

“C’mon, I’ll buy you a soda . . . ,” Asuka said, her voice almost kind, as she wheeled Ayanami around the bench and back into the school.

It left him and Nagisa alone. Nagisa had clenched his hands into fists where they sat on the wood, his eyebrows furrowed in thought or distress.

Shinji tried to do what the other boy had done before, and shakily laid his hand over Nagisa’s. “Don’t listen to Asuka, it doesn’t matter at all—you can keep it, it’s fine!”

But it didn’t help. In fact Nagisa pulled away and began undoing the buttons on his sweater over the top of Shinji’s pleas, shrugging out of it jerkily to reveal the short-sleeves of his button-up and long, white arms. When Shinji held up his hands in front of him in refusal, Nagisa just took one and began threading Shinji’s arm through the sleeve.

“I really _don’t_ want you to get sick,” He said under his breath.

“Nagisa-kun I don’t think I’ll catch a cold, I mean it—,”

“You’ll make me feel better if you wear it.”

Asuka was right, he was nothing but a push-over. They sat in silence for a while, and Shinji felt awful as he slowly began soaking through the over-sized sweater, unable to meet Nagisa’s eyes. Eventually Nagisa said, “You should button it up, it’s warmer that way,” and when Shinji didn’t move, he turned and began to do it for him, firmly looking nowhere but the buttons. Shinji felt a stab of affection as he watched Nagisa’s hands work. It was very apparent now how pale he was when you could see where his shirt lay against his skin, and the two were nearly the same color. It was color that stopped Shinji as he was admiring Nagisa, something like discoloration on the inside of his forearms.

Shinji was terrible. Shinji ruined everything. He’d been trying to console Nagisa in some way, he’d been trying to be kind back, as he touched Nagisa’s arm and turned it upward curiously. His heart stopped when he saw the assortment of thin and thick lines that scored the skin from Nagisa’s wrist to his inner elbow. Some of them were still scabs, dark and rough. Recent.

Nagisa carefully twisted his arm out of Shinji’s grasp and finished the buttons on the sweater. Then he sat back, silent, with his head still angled downward.

Not knowing what to do or say, Shinji turned away, his mind blank with shock. He was overwhelmed with the knowledge of all the good things about Nagisa, and he wondered if Nagisa didn’t feel the same way about himself as Shinji did.

“I’m sorry Ikari-kun,” Nagisa said suddenly. “I am aware Lilin don’t like this. I didn’t want to make you uncomfortable.”

He asked Nagisa why.

“I like the sensation.”

“You like _hurting_ yourself?”

“Well, it’s not really hurting if I enjoy it . . . ,” When Shinji didn’t say anything, Nagisa continued, “Ikari-kun, pain is very similar to pleasure. It is a matter of perspective.”

“You can’t like _that_ better than—than pleasure though? Why isn’t pleasure enough?”

Shinji was one to talk. Like he knew the first thing about it.

Nagisa made a noise like laughter. “I confess I hardly know what anyone means by it.”

“Well it’s, it’s like hanging out with your friends! You don’t enjoy that—hanging out with us?”

“Of course I do,” Nagisa sounded sad now and _damn_ he shouldn’t have said that, a fresh bout of self-loathing closed his throat. “But one might say that’s mental pleasure, correct? To be analogous with physical pain, it would have to be physical pleasure. And I’m not sure what that would be, to be perfectly honest.”

At that Shinji turned back to Nagisa incredulously, who glanced up at Shinji through his eyelashes. It was a bad idea on Shinji’s part because he had many, many ideas about what would constitute physical pleasure, and with Nagisa looking at him so earnestly like that, his face turned scarlet.

Opening and closing his mouth did nothing, the words wouldn’t come out, in part because he feared he’d say something like _well duh, sex_ and embarrass himself. But Nagisa was staring at him patiently, expectantly, so Shinji ordered his thoughts and cleared his throat.

“Well uh I guess—like taking a hot bath, or like hugging and stuff. You know.” Good one Shinji.

“Hugging is pleasurable?”

Shinji raised his eyebrows.

“I thought it was more of a gesture to convey affection, I didn’t realize it in and of itself was pleasurable.”

“It’s a little of both I gue—,” He stopped. “You’ve been hugged before, right Nagisa-kun?”

“No,” Nagisa tilted his head, considering. “Should I have? Oh—,” Shinji felt like he was going to cry, so it must have been showing on his face, with the way Nagisa was looking at him, his hand twitching as if to touch him. “I’m sorry.”

“No don’t say that . . . ,” Oh god he really was, he was crying.

But then Nagisa shifted forward on the bench and wrapped his arms around Shinji woodenly, his palms flat on his back but his elbows extended out. It was such a sad attempt at hugging that it actually made Shinji react, and he returned the hug but in the way he’d always wanted one, with his arms wound tightly around Nagisa’s torso and his head resting on his shoulder. He could feel Nagisa’s ribs through the thin cloth of his shirt where his hands held either side of his waist.

The other boy began to relax, arms dropping so that they rested against Shinji’s sides, who sniffed noisily and prayed his nose wasn’t running. But Shinji didn’t get to enjoy it for very long, from behind them the front doors opened and Asuka was saying, “Alright Idiots, I called Misato—oh _wow_.”

But having just gone through a lot of emotional turmoil in a very short amount of time, Shinji had passed the amount of shit he was prepared to take from her today. And he realized he was seething with anger that she had known about Nagisa’s arms and goaded him into revealing them. Disentangling himself and standing, Shinji faced where she, Ayanami, and surprisingly Horaki had just walked through the doors, arm-in-arm with Asuka in the middle.

“ _Give it a rest_ , will you!” He shouted, and Horaki was so surprised she dropped her lunch pail. “He didn’t do anything to you, would you just _leave it alone_ for once?”

But Asuka was better at the whole yelling thing than Shinji was, so as she squared her shoulders and her mouth curled nastily, Shinji grabbed Nagisa by the hand, yanking him off the bench and out into the rain.

“But won’t you get sick—?” Nagisa said confusedly as Shinji led him at a run through the school gates.

“It’s not cold enough for anybody to get sick, it’s just a little uncomfortable,” Then, realizing he had just forced Nagisa to come with him, he backpedaled, “I-I’m sorry—I just didn’t want to be around her anymore—,”

“Oh, no it’s alright, I don’t mind being wet. Anyway, she needs some time to calm down, I think.”

When they had put enough distance between themselves and the school and he was starting to come out of his blinding anger at Asuka, Shinji became very aware two things: one, that he had left his book bag on the bench— _Maybe Ayanami will grab it for me_ , he thought gloomily—and two, that they were still holding hands. Without making it too obvious, Shinji let his fingers go slack so that Nagisa could slip his hand out.

Nagisa squeezed Shinji’s hand and held on. After another surge of affection, Shinji tightened his grip.

Their clothes were a lost cause by the time they arrived at the train station, and the people milling about gave them sympathetic glances. Shinji hoped they weren’t noticing the hand holding, but if Nagisa still wanted to, then he couldn’t let go. There were only two safe places to look now, at his feet or at Nagisa’s face, and the scabs of the reminder why sometimes caught against the sweater sleeve where the inside of their arms touched. They came to a stop in front of the platform for Shinji’s train silently. His was always the first to come, and Nagisa was going in the opposite direction.

Shinji’s feet weren’t very interesting though. Instead he looked up at Nagisa and the way his hair touched his collar now that it was flat and wet, instead of flying around his head at odd angles. Inevitably, Nagisa looked back at Shinji, but something about his smile seemed uncertain. Maybe he still felt bad that Shinji had found out.

An automated voice announced the arrival of his train, and he said, “Nagisa-kun, I have to go now . . . ,” and squeezed his hand, implying that he needed it back.

But Nagisa glanced at the advancing train, down at his feet, and then up at Shinji, saying, “Can I come on the train with you?”

There was nothing Shinji could say against that, and he wondered uneasily if how quickly he said yes was less about him not being able to tell people no, and more that Nagisa had been the one asking.

It was air-conditioned on the train, because to those who weren’t soaking wet it was still muggy. Being a little after rush hour, most of the seats were already taken, so the two of them stood so that they didn’t drip on anyone (sothattheydidn’thavetositapart). Shinji relapsed into embarrassment as Nagisa, shivering, pressed his side against Shinji. They were extremely conspicuous.

"Do you need the sweater . . . ?” Shinji asked quietly, though as the words left his mouth he felt like an idiot. It had long ago lost all of its warmth-inducing qualities, it stuck to his body like paint.

“I’m fine,” Nagisa smiled, “I’m just not used to wearing short-sleeves, I think. But you can keep it for now.”

“Well . . . it’s just that, you’re kind of close . . . ,”

Nagisa hummed in agreement. “Yes, I find it pleasant. Is it alright?”

There was nothing Shinji could say but yes.

\--

Maybe it was because he didn’t know any better or maybe it was some weird German thing, but after that Nagisa began to indulge himself in casual touches that Shinji frankly didn’t know how to deal with. Admittedly, Shinji had always been trapped in a strange paradox between hating to be touched and wanting someone to hold him, but—that day had been an exception, you know. A relaxation of the walls around him because it was Shinji saying sorry for hurting Nagisa’s feelings, and now everything was supposed to go back to normal. Shinji couldn’t figure out why Nagisa kept _doing_ it.

Sometimes it was as innocuous as grabbing the back of Shinji’s shirt and not letting go unless Shinji detached him; and then sometimes Nagisa would come up behind him while he sat at his desk and lean over his shoulder unannounced, pressing his chest against Shinji’s back and talking in his ear, and Shinji would jump and shove him and scold him, in spite of Nagisa’s pouting face.

Then there were other times—like waiting afterschool for Asuka to finish cleaning—Nagisa would press his side against Shinji while they leaned against the wall and lay his head on Shinji’s shoulder, and Shinji would let him, reminding himself he couldn’t melt or they’d both fall over.

The change was apparently not just obvious to Shinji, because Toji pulled him aside one day before class started and asked him, completely serious, “Hey—isn’t he bothering you?”

“Wuh-what?” Shinji said a little too loudly. Toji rolled his eyes.

“Take a breath alright Shinji? I’m talkin’ bout the way he hangs all over you. ‘Cause let me tell ya I have _no_ problem—,”

Asuka called his name from the other side of the classroom and Shinji half-shouted, “Yes!” before turning and fleeing. Thankfully, Toji didn’t try to talk to him about it again—apparently he’d gotten his message across and didn’t feel the need to reiterate—but he’d still give Shinji the occasional pointed look when he thought Nagisa was overstepping his boundaries.

The other change that happened was that Shinji started doing research. Because it seemed that while Nagisa was ashamed of the—the cutting, he wasn’t interested in quitting either, and when the idea got him alone Shinji still felt sick about it. But every argument he tried in his head felt fake, he didn’t know if there was anything he could _say_ to make Nagisa change his mind. He didn’t know that he had the right to say anything.

Up to that point, he had never really used his laptop other than doing homework. But one night where he had been lying in bed thinking of the pale lines, Shinji crawled to his desk, opened up a search engine, and typed in “self-harm.”

**Author's Note:**

> So this fic is predominantly Kawoshin, but its the first part of an Asuka/Shinji/Kaworu/Rei fic. So uh. This started off a PWP oneshot that got very out of hand.


End file.
